Principal Data Engineer, IG Group
3 days a week in office
The UK's No.1 trading provider
Open for applications
The UK's No.1 trading provider
1001+ employees
Open for applications
3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
We challenge anything that holds investors back.
Role
Who you are
- Hands-on experience designing and operating large-scale data pipelines on GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Composer/Airflow, GCS), with proven knowledge of Apache Kafka and real-time streaming architectures
- Demonstrated experience leading or technically mentoring a team of data engineers, with the ability to set standards, conduct code and design reviews, and grow engineers’ capabilities
- Strong grasp of data quality practices: data contracts, pipeline observability, SLA/SLO definition, and automated alerting and remediation
- Solid understanding of SQL transformation patterns and modern tooling such as dbt, alongside experience managing ingestion estates with third-party connectors and in-house integrations
- Clear and confident communicator able to work cross-functionally with non-technical stakeholders; comfortable in a regulated financial services environment with structured delivery disciplines (sprint cadences, change control, escalation)
What the job involves
- IG’s Data function is a central capability serving both central and divisional business lines across the entire IG estate. The Data Engineering team is responsible for the platforms that underpin analytics, reporting, compliance, and client-facing data products, and that will increasingly power AI and machine-learning use cases across the firm
- The current data landscape reflects IG’s growth: a combination of GCP-native capabilities, on-premises systems, and a legacy AWS data platform. The strategic direction — endorsed by the CDO and Executive — is clear: consolidate onto GCP, raise the bar on data quality, and enable self-service access to trusted data for teams across the business
- Own the technical architecture of IG’s GCP data platform end-to-end — Core Lake (BigQuery), batch and real-time (Kafka) ingestion, transformation in the Medallion architecture, and Data-Engineering-owned integration services — setting the reference designs and patterns squads build against
- Lead delivery of the most complex, high-risk work within the GCP consolidation programme, including migration off the legacy AWS platform and on-premises systems onto GCP-native capabilities
- Define the platform contracts, interfaces, and self-service patterns that let mature divisions build and own their own models safely against trusted Core Lake data, and ensure fully-managed builds for less-mature functions follow the identical pattern so they are handover-ready by design
- Drive data quality as a first-class, firm-wide concern: establish data contracts, observability, SLA/SLO monitoring, and automated alerting and remediation across ingestion and transformation layers, and hold squads to those standards
- Act as the senior technical point of contact for stakeholders across Compliance, Marketing, Finance, Data Science, and the self-serving divisions (UK, APAC, tastytrade/US, Quants, Risk), translating requirements into well-scoped, well-architected engineering deliverables
- Set and uphold engineering standards through code and design reviews, technical mentoring, and reusable frameworks that raise the bar across squads in London, India, and Poland — growing the technical capability of the whole function
- Provide technical direction and quality assurance for third-party staff augmentation, ensuring augmented capacity engaged for time-boxed projects works to IG’s patterns and leaves behind maintainable, standards-compliant assets
- Maintain delivery rigour: shape sprint cadences, escalate technical risk early, and report on pipeline SLOs, data freshness, and DORA-style engineering metrics to the Head of Data Engineering and CDO
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Founded in 1974 by Stuart Wheeler as a UK-based spread betting company for gold, IG Group, abbreviated from Investors Gold Index, was initially set up to allow people to speculate and trade on the price change of gold without owning physical gold. And in the year 2000, it was listed on the London Stock Exchange and its gradual evolution into the world of fintech began.
By 2011, the company had played a part in numerous international buyouts before narrowing its focus down to financial wagers. During the latter half of that decade, IG shut down its binary options trading platform and focused instead on building an investment portfolio with partner BlackRock Investments, all whilst maintaining its Forex and CFD trading processes. Since then, it has become a fast-paced market leader in the investment space.
In recent years, IG Group has developed major platforms for various trading actions and has grown profit and revenue significantly. Alongside this it has acquired a number of companies, including tastytrade and Freetrade, and launched its own crypto product, making it the first UK-listed company to launch crypto trading to retail investors. This further proves how much of a staple IG Group is in the world of financial trading.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company values
- Think big
- Deliver at pace
- Raise the bar
- Lead and inspire
- Champion the client
Company HQ
City of London, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Breon Corcoran
(Group CEO)Joined IG Group as CEO in January 2024. Prior to this, they were the CEO of WorldRemit and a Non-Executive Director at Tilney Group.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at IG Group
- Employee-led LGBTQ+, Women’s, Black and Parents & Carers networks with an annual budget for organising events & projects that foster an open, diverse and inclusive culture.
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